Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1. Ray Bradbury

body felt the warmth of the room, the sudden reality of the preparations table on which to lean, panting.

      ‘Move!’

      The body took a creaking, slow step.

      ‘Hear!’ she snapped.

      The noises of the place came into the dull ears. The harsh, expectant breath of the mortician, shaken; the whimpering Mr Carrington; her own crackling voice.

      ‘Walk!’ she said.

      The body walked.

      ‘Think!’ she said.

      The old brain thought.

      ‘Speak!’ she said.

      The body spoke, bowing to the morticians:

      ‘Much obliged. Thank you.’

      ‘Now,’ she said, finally, ‘cry!’

      And she began to cry tears of utter happiness.

      And now, any afternoon about four, if you want to visit Aunt Tildy, you just walk around to her antique shop and rap. There’s a big, black funeral wreath on the door. Don’t mind that! Aunt Tildy left it there: that’s how her humor runs. You rap on the door. It’s double-barred and triple-locked, and when you rap her voice shrills out at you.

      ‘Is that the man in black?’

      And you laugh and say. No, no, it’s only me, Aunt Tildy.

      And she laughs and says. ‘Come on in, quick!’ and she whips the door open and slams it shut behind, so no man in black can ever slip in with you. Then she sets you down and pours your coffee and shows you her latest knitted sweater. She’s not as fast as she used to be, and can’t see as good, but she gets on.

      ‘And if you’re ’specially good,’ Aunt Tildy declares, setting her coffee cup to one side, ‘I’ll give you a little treat.’

      ‘What’s that?’ visitors will ask.

      ‘This,’ says Auntie, pleased with her little uniqueness, her little joke.

      Then with modest moves of her fingers she will unfasten the white lace at her neck and chest and for a brief moment show what lies beneath.

      The long blue scar where the autopsy was neatly sewn together.

      ‘Not bad sewin’ for a man,’ she allows. ‘Oh, some more coffee? There!’

       There Will Come Soft Rains

      In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!

      In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny-side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

      ‘Today is August 4, 2026,’ said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, ‘in the city of Allendale, California.’ It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. ‘Today is Mr Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.’

      Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

      Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: ‘Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today …’ And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.

      Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.

      At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.

      Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.

      Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.

      Ten o’clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

      Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

      The five spots of paint – the man, the woman, the children, the ball – remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

      The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.

      Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, ‘Who goes there? What’s the password?’ and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.

      It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!

      The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

       Twelve noon.

      A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.

      The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.

      For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.

      The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here.

      It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.

      The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.

      Two o’clock, sang a voice.

      Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.

       Two-fifteen.

      The